Backstage with: Surfer Blood

It’s late in the afternoon when I arrive at Mississippi Studios, the Portland venue where Surfer Blood is set to play that night. I call their bassist, Kevin Williams, who still acts as their manager when the band travels without one. He answers, and tells me that he and frontman John Paul Pitts will meet me in the bar next door. I grab us a table outside, but as soon as the two round the corner from backstage, they’re immediately bombarded by a group of fans, who insist on buying them (and reluctantly, me as well) a pitcher of beer. “What do you guys want?” they shout to our table. “I’m not picky,” Kevin says. “Yeah, dealer’s choice,” JP adds.

Have you found you’ve been getting recognized a lot more lately?

JP: *Laughs* Yeah, you know, I mean it’s pretty likely at your own show — but at the grocery store, or on the street? Not too often.

Still, it seems like you guys have been gaining some serious momentum. What’s the biggest show you’ve played so far?

JP: Probably the US Open of Surfing in Orange County.

KW: It’s a free event with professional surfers and a ton of bands that play afterwards on the beach. People are already there all day for the surf event, so the estimate I heard was 30,000 people were there for the show.

JP: We opened up for MGMT, which was really cool.

KW: Yeah, I mean, it’s actually big enough that people might have not even realized that we were playing to them live. It probably just sounded like music over speakers at a certain point.

How did you all first meet?

JP: We went to the same high school —

KW: Yeah, we all played shows in different bands but would occasionally end up on the same bill. We ended up doing it long enough that all of our local bands broke up, people went off to college, and we were kind of the only ones left still really taking it seriously — and I think in a small town like West Palm, we’re all meeting each other and feeling like, “We’ve been playing shows together long enough, let’s just do this all as one.”

JP: *Laughs* We were all pretty involved in the weird West Palm scene, which is probably only like thirty people. So it was only a matter of time till we found each other.

You just put out your third album, 1000 Palms. Anything else currently in the works?

KW: Now that we’re no longer on Warner Brothers, we just recently started doing a lot more B-sides. So we’ve been putting out some weird covers and one-offs which has been really fun, you know, because it was something that we weren’t able to do when there was such a long approval process.

JP: Yup, we’ve been piecing together a home recording set up in my apartment.

KW: We even did a Christmas song for charity.

JP: *Laughs* So, if you’ve ever wanted to hear us cover a Chipmunks Christmas song, that’s on the internet somewhere now.

It sounds like you guys have been able to relax a lot more this time around. What was your process like when you were writing 1000 Palms?

JP: You know, after being on Warner Brothers for so long, we were used to having to demo songs over and over again, and then bounce them off A & R people for so long that it became such a slow process. This time we were like, “We’re not gonna overthink anything. We’re gonna get into a room together, we’re going to write ten songs, we’re not gonna worry about, you know, ‘Is this a cohesive record?” We’re just gonna do what feels right for each song, and hope that it turns out right at the end. So far, we seem to be pretty good at tying things together.

KW: There were some songs, like the second one on the album,“Island,” which we worked on for years, and tried with different producers that took forever to get right. But then there are others we wrote literally the night before we went into the studio. “Feast-Famine” was an idea JP had less than 12 hours before we were supposed to be going in to track drums. Each song really comes from different places and at different times. Although, we did write a lot of the record here in Portland. We were renting a house from our friend’s band called Wild Ones while they were on tour. Their house wasn’t being used, so we spent a month in the city and really enjoyed it. We used their practice space to write probably four or five songs on the record.

JP: We got in there and took old material and ideas that we had kind of set aside and added some new ones and then just strung it together. Then when we went back to Florida we recorded it.

KW: Mississippi Studios was actually kind of the kickoff for the writing period. We played here on New Year’s Eve. We flew in a day or two beforehand and stayed upstairs for the first few nights, had a good show, and then started demoing songs the next day.

It must have been pretty fun having everybody living together in the same place for awhile though.

KW: *Laughs* You know we’ve tried it out before, we’ve lived together in a couple different houses, but at this point we’ve been a band now for like six years now and it’s just way too many people to be in one spot.

JP: In a way too, being in a van is more intimate anyway. At least in a house you can go to your own room, but when you’re on the road for ten hours that’s when you really get to know each other.

How long have you guys been on the road for this tour?

JP: We did three weeks from Atlanta up to New York then across to Chicago. We all got five days off basically to do laundry, get our shit together then we played San Francisco two nights ago, and this is show number two on the West Coast. Ten more ahead of us. 

You had some major setbacks on your last tour. I’m sorry to hear about Thomas.

KW: Yeah, we had a couple really difficult points for us. It was our first full tour without our guitarist Thomas because he’s battling cancer. Then on top of that our fill-in guitarist had a death in the family where he was gone for a week of the tour. So we played a week of shows as a three piece which was interesting. Then our van got broken into. But it goes to show that we can pull through and roll with the punches I guess.

JP: We definitely had to learn to adapt in more ways than one. You know it used to be that we had to have our own equipment to be able to play, but now we’re at a point where you could give us a guitar with three strings and a shaker and we could make it work.

KW: There were a lot of great moments on the tour too though. We did a benefit show in New York for Thomas that was really fun. We had an after party where we all crammed into a karaoke bar that’s about the size of a studio apartment with like seventy people, definitely violating a bunch of fire codes — but it was just a really fun time seeing all of our friends from a bunch of different bands jumping up to do karaoke with each other.

JP: Yeah, that was really nice seeing how generous people have been helping to raise money for Tom, and also just seeing bands willing to donate their time as well. You know, watching them taking a whole night to play a couple songs and help rally around Tom was great. People have just been so cool.

I’m glad to hear it. Thanks for taking some time to chat guys, I’m excited to see the show.

JP: Sure thing.

KW: Thank you.